


to dare to see

by susiecarter



Category: Newsies (1992)
Genre: Bad Flirting, Extra Treat, Gay Chicken, M/M, Post-Canon, Trick or Treat: Chocolate Box, Trick or Treat: Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-29
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2019-01-26 06:04:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12550816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/susiecarter/pseuds/susiecarter
Summary: Post-movie, Jack and David start to play a long slow game of not-quite-gay-chicken; no one loses.





	to dare to see

**Author's Note:**

  * For [atlanticslide](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlanticslide/gifts).



> A quick little Newsies treat for you, atlanticslide—hope you like it, and happy ToT! ♥
> 
> Title from a quote from May Swenson.

 

 

Things didn't change afterward as much as David had thought they might.

As much as he'd been afraid they might, if he was honest with himself. That day the strike had ended, everybody cheering in the street, David had been glad—but scared, too, at the way everything seemed to have opened up. If they could win a strike, beat Pulitzer, then what couldn't they do? What couldn't _Jack_ do?

It had looked, for a solid minute or two, like there wasn't an answer. Jack had gotten in that carriage, and he hadn't actually been leaving, but David hadn't known it right then. And Jack leaving—it had seemed just as possible as anything else, all sorts of things suddenly and terrifyingly in reach that hadn't been before.

But then Jack had come back. He'd come back and he'd grinned at David, swung down off the carriage and taken David's hand and not left at all. Which almost made it better, in a way—almost made it mean more, that the chance had been there and he'd turned it down, when before he couldn't have gone to Santa Fe even though he'd wanted to.

And everything had settled right back into place. Father hadn't healed up, though he was getting there; David still had to sell papes for a while yet, and couldn't go back to school. Jack stayed, and he and the rest of the newsies still had to scrape and scrounge, but didn't have to count every nickel quite so carefully, with prices settled somewhere halfway decent again.

It was all the way it had been before, just about.

Except for Jack.

 

 

It took David a while to notice. Jack looked the same, talked the same, laughed the same. Sometimes he was a little quieter, more thoughtful; sometimes David looked up, feeling eyes on him, and found they were Jack's, watching him with a strange steady intensity.

But the thing that made it really obvious, unmissable, was the dares.

They started out all right. Jack had always liked dares, liked making them and accepting them—you could get him to at least try almost anything you could think of, if you made it a dare, and he was mostly a good sport about it if you turned his down, especially if you were willing to counter-propose one you thought was better.

But he'd never put them to David so often before. David laughed off the stupid dangerous ones, the ones that were as likely as not to end in broken arms. But some of them were all right—to sneak Racetrack's dice and hide them somewhere he couldn't find them, that kind of thing. And it was a treat all its own just to accept them, with the bright pleased way Jack grinned at him when he did.

And then one day, late afternoon, as the crowd was thinning out, they were talking over whether to give up and head back to Kloppman's already, and Jack said, "Hold my hand."

David blinked at him, confused, feeling his ears go inexplicably hot. "What?"

Jack laughed, papes bunched up under one arm, and held out the other, and said, "Hold my hand—dare you."

"You _dare_ me," David repeated uncertainly.

Jack tilted his head. "Whole way back to the lodging house, or you're selling twenty of my papes tomorrow."

Not much of a penalty. Especially not coming from Jack, who was usually much more imaginative. David hesitated, looking from Jack's face to his outstretched hand and back again, and then—

He didn't quite know what it was he saw, just then. The faint line that had creased up between Jack's brows, maybe; the way the angle of his mouth had changed, faltered, smile gone a shade uncertain; how his eyes flicked off away from David and then shyly back, as if he couldn't help it.

"Oh, as if," David heard himself say, and took Jack's hand in his own.

Jack made a joke out of it, of course—how they had to dodge around people in the street the same direction, because they couldn't let go, or getting hung up exaggeratedly on a lamppost.

But David's heart was thumping helplessly anyway, touching Jack for so long and on purpose. He hadn't realized until now, until they'd been broken, that there had been rules he'd been sticking to; that he could touch Jack for a long time if it seemed unintentional, feet nudged up under a table or shoulders brushing, or on purpose if he was quick about it, clapping Jack on the back or punching him in the shoulder. But both at once was—

Both at once was dangerous somehow, went too far or said too much. And, David realized slowly, Jack had to know it, because that was what made this a dare. That was what made this something risky.

He glanced at Jack, who was talking—something about Mush owing him, a bet Blink had lost him—and not looking at David; whose fingers were twined tight around David's, warm, forearm bumping David's every couple steps.

"Hey," David said suddenly, interrupting, and that made Jack look over at last, eyebrow raised.

"Yeah?"

"I'm glad you didn't go to Santa Fe," David said.

"Aw, I told you," Jack said with a sniff, shrugging. "Didn't need to, that's all."

"Yeah," David said, and then, deliberately, "I'm glad."

And Jack looked at him with narrowed eyes for a long moment, and then suddenly grinned, lopsided. "Whatever you say, Walkin' Mouth," he agreed, and then tilted his head back and laughed at the look on David's face.

 

 

So that was the first time. And it wasn't every dare after that—just some of them.

A card game in the lodging house, with too many newsies and not enough chairs; and Jack dared David in an undertone to take his, and then spent the whole rest of the evening standing over him, leaning on his shoulders, cheek pressed to David's temple, telling him what cards to play and laughing over his terrible hands.

One crisp evening late in the year, just when it was really starting to get cold; and Jack dared David to come up on the roof with him, to lie there under a couple of blankets he'd scrounged from somewhere and look at the stars. David pressed his knee to Jack's under the blanket, and his arm to Jack's from shoulder to elbow, looked at Jack's face in the starlight and thought about telling him he'd have come up even if Jack had just asked—even if it hadn't been a dare at all.

Jack dared David to do all kinds of things, that winter. To sit with him, when it was cold; to share the huge heavy coat he'd found in an alley and washed 'til it didn't smell half bad. To hold his hand again, all sorts of different distances—on a trip to Brooklyn to make a delivery to Spot and his boys, or home to David's from the lodging house. To split one of these new things called a milkshake, once it finally started warming up again, from the place down the street that was selling them—David didn't take that one until he'd made Jack swear up and down there wasn't any alcohol in it. (There wasn't; it was delicious, cold and sweet, and drinking it pressed up against Jack from hip to shoulder only made it taste better, David was sure.)

And then one day Jack got himself in a spot of trouble with the Delanceys. David didn't even see what happened—Jack had gone off to buy himself a little something for lunch and left David selling, and then all at once he came pelting back around the corner and almost knocked David over.

"Jack!"

"Davey, hey," Jack said winningly, though the effect was marred a little by how hard he was breathing.

David raised an eyebrow at him, mock-stern. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Runnin'," Jack agreed with a grin, "and yeah, it's Oscar and Morris. Just like old times, huh?"

"Oh, for crying out loud," David said, and then Jack took him by the elbow and hustled him off sideways into a narrow little alleyway.

There was a staircase, wrought iron, heading up one wall. Jack steered them around into the little shadowy space behind it, pressing David back into the bricks and shushing him, glancing through the stairs for any sign of the Delanceys.

"Jack—"

"Hush!" Jack hissed, pressing his hand absently over David's mouth.

And that, David thought dimly, was just too much for any sane man to bear. Jack was right up against him, crowding him close, the heel of his hand curved gently around the line of David's jaw.

David squeezed his eyes shut and waited what felt like an hour, but if the Delanceys were still looking for Jack, they must've gone the wrong direction. There wasn't any shouting from the street, or at least not any that sounded like Oscar or Morris, and everybody passing just kept passing, nobody slowing to step into this particular alley.

And finally David couldn't wait any more. He reached up and caught Jack's wrist, tugged enough to pull Jack's hand off his mouth, and said, "Jack."

"What?" Jack said, still peering out at the street. "Davey—" and then he glanced at David and shut his mouth, and his eyes went wide.

"Jack," David whispered, heart pounding, and he knew exactly what it was he wanted, but he didn't have the words to ask for it, didn't know what to say—

And then, all at once, he did.

"Jack, hold still," David said. "Hold still—I dare you."

And Jack looked at him and swallowed and didn't move, even when David leaned in, and maybe not just because he hated to welsh on a dare.

David only meant to—to try it, to see what it would feel like, kissing Jack; he wasn't sure he was brave enough to linger. Though maybe he could work up to that, if Jack didn't mind him taking another couple tries later.

But his mouth touched Jack's, and for a second he and Jack were both frozen with the shock of it. And then all at once Jack was surging into him, shoving him back against the alley wall, hands coming up to settle unsteadily against David's face; and they kissed and kissed and kissed, until David finally had to break away to catch his breath.

"Davey," Jack said unsteadily. "David, I don't—I don't got to dare you the next time I want to do that, right? Tell me I don't."

And David tipped his head back against the bricks and laughed. "No, Jack, you don't," he promised, and then he yanked Jack back in close and kissed him again.

 

 


End file.
